In a multicommodity life cycle setting with uncertainty and time additive expected utility, this note finds necessary and sufficient conditions on preferences for all but one optimal decision each period to be independent of the future and of uncertainty.

This paper analyses an open economy Ramsey model with an endogenous labour supply without capital. The technology defines an optimal firm size. Changes to the number of firms is subject to adjustment costs, so that the entry dynamics is determined endogenously. We find that there is a short run...

This paper examines a two-period model of optimal nonlinear income taxation with learning-by-doing, in which second-period wages are an increasing function of first-period labour supply. We consider the cases when the government can and cannot commit to its second-period tax policy. In both...

Fiscal consolidation programmes have been adopted almost uni-versally in the developed world since 2011 in an effort to reverse the substantially worsened fiscal outlook in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Prolonged stagnation combined with increasing debt levels over this period...

This paper presents a comprehensive assessment of fiscal austerity, with special emphasis on its distributional consequences, which are surprisingly ignored in the existing literature. Using amedium scale DSGE model we find that both the aggregate and distributional consequences of fiscal...

We provide new evidence on the extent to which the demand for cigarettes is derived from the demand for weight control (i.e. weight loss or avoidance of weight gain). We utilize nationally representative data that provide the most direct evidence to date on this question: individuals are...

This paper shows that tax reform techniques are well-suited to an examination of the Laffer argument, i.e., the possibility that an increase in a tax rate may reduce tax revenues (and vice versa). Our methodology allows us to examine the Laffer argument directly, without deriving the Laffer...

This paper investigates formation of expected longevity in an elderly popu- lation. We use Italian data from the early (2004) release of the Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE). The SHARE provides a numerical measure for subjective survival probability (SSP). To assess...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being with those people with values below a certain threshold regarded as suffering from mental stress. Comparison of mental stress levels across populations may then be sensitive to the chosen threshold. This...

The General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) is frequently used as a measure of mental well-being. A consistent pattern across countries is that women report lower levels of mental well-being, as measured by the GHQ. This paper applies decomposition techniques to Irish data for 1994 and 2000 to...